So far, we’ve thought of ourselves as content-oriented people, so we’ve used standard off-the-shelf software such as WordPress (for our main website and blog) and MediaWiki (for our information wiki). Part of the reason is that we wanted to focus on content creation rather than interface design, but part of the reason we’ve stuck to these is that we didn’t think we could design interfaces. Once we’ve acquired more programming and design experience, we might be more open to the idea of designing interfaces and software that can meet particular needs of our target audience.
I think using the standard software was the correct choice, and IMHO it would be better to forget completely about making your own code. Even if you acquire more programming and design experience.
To explain why, just look at how much time it takes to add new features to LessWrong website, even the seemingly trivial ones like “display meetup announcements and dicsussion articles separately”. Months and months.
It’s because the web technologies are getting more and more complex over years. More and more features are invented, more and more functionality is considered “standard”, because everyone else has it. But it all still needs a lot of work and maintenance! Unless you want to become a full-time software development company, that means unless you have a group of coders that only do the web interface and nothing else, just don’t do this. Otherwise you risk spending hundreds of hours on mediocre product, where you could have better functionality by e.g. using some more advanced MediaWiki features.
If information is your product, I would suggest making the wiki page easier to navigate. For example the starting page seems like… well, honestly if someone would send me a hyperlink to that, or if google would show me that, I would just quickly close the browser tab.
For example:
College portal links to pages about college admissions, college selection, college academics, majors, online presence, and issues related to emotional and social well-being.
Uhm, why are the words “college admissions”, “college selection” et cetera not hyperlinks? Is that some anti-SEO signalling? Which one of your customers would search for “portal”? Does anyone even use that word in this century? Instead of “a link to portal which hopefully contains the links to X, Y, Z”, just provide the links to X, Y, Z directly. Pur a simple but colored picture representing “college”, and clickable “college admissions”, “college selection” etc below it.
Okay, maybe when you started doing this, you didn’t see the wiki as your primary tool, so you gave it less attention. But maybe now it seems different. Make it easy to navigate, if that’s your main product. You made a lot of good research—great! But it also needs to be accessible, otherwise people will not read it.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts :).
I think using the standard software was the correct choice, and IMHO it would be better to forget completely about making your own code. Even if you acquire more programming and design experience.
I agree that if we are trying to do something with the same approximate functionality as MediaWiki or WordPress, it’s best to use these standard softwares, even if we think our needs are somewhat different. So I am satisfied with the interface choices we made given our content focus.
What I had in mind was more that we might want to create some sort of customized, interactive website, software, or app, such as the ones we listed (Anki, Beeminder). Here, it’s harder to use an existing, off-the-shelf solution. We’d have to code it ourselves. Now, at present, we don’t have specific ideas for such interactive websites, but there may be scope for such websites in the future. If we have more programming experience, we’ll be able to come up with and evaluate such ideas.
If information is your product, I would suggest making the wiki page easier to navigate. For example the starting page seems like… well, honestly if someone would send me a hyperlink to that, or if google would show me that, I would just quickly close the browser tab.
We will be looking into improving our main page. Thanks for the pointer there. In general, there’s a conflict between keeping the front page sufficiently simple and including enough information on it so that people can easily find what they want. We’ve been looking regularly at our site’s usage analytics to refine our decisions as to how to restructure the site, and we intend to continue doing so.
Sorry for the tone in previous message; I was tired, and wanted to deliver the information.
I’d ask it this way: What is your core mission? Seems to me it is “providing advice for students”. So I’d recommend to focus 100% on this, and treat everything else as a shiny distraction. (Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection. For example: On the main page, you have a link to “What we offer and why”. Why not put that into the main page? The page “What we offer and why” contains a link to “Learning portal”; the page “Learning portal” contains a link to “Our category on the benefits of learning particular subjects” (and also directly to math, algebra and economics; this part well-done!), and the page “Category:Subject learning benefits” contains a link to e.g. “Chemistry learning benefits”. And the “Chemistry learning benefits” contains a text “We’re still working on this page, so check back later!” (and a hyperlink to a useful topic). -- Uhm, seriously? It takes four clicks to discover the page about to chemistry, only to learn that you have almost nothing about chemistry?
On the other hand, I guess I understand how this all happened. This is a “top down” approach: you create a huge abstract structure where you want to fill the details later. This feels very high-status. But it’s optimized for how you feel about it, not for the convenience of the reader. -- I suggest the opposite, “bottom up” approach. You have the valuable pieces of information (for example the external link to quora article about learning chemistry). That’s the value you provide, and you want to navigate the reader there as easily as possible. So you build the navigation pages around the content you already have, not around the content you wish you had.
For example, one external hyperlink is not enough to make a separate page about chemistry. You probably have more such links for other subjects, so it makes sense to create a page “Advice about specific subjects”, divide it to subjects by headers and subheaders, and put the links there. (In future, when you have more than 10 chemistry-related links, or perhaps if you have 5 chemistry-related links but you also provide a short summary below the link, then it’s the right time to create a separate “Advice about Chemistry” page.) And your main page should link directly to the “Advice about specific subjects” page, because that’s one of the main things you provide. There: Just two clicks, and the reader is reading the Quora article. There is the same information there as before, it’s just easier to find.
Maybe it would be good to have one person researching the information you want to put on the web page, and another person who would maintain the structure of the web. One person to focus on “what” and other person to focus on “how”.
Thanks again. We really appreciate the detailed comment.
I discussed your comment with Vipul, but didn’t have a chance to run the final version of my response by him.
(Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
Vipul was making the general point that to date we’ve been focused on content, partially out of virtue of lacking technical skills, and that it could be more socially valuable create a platform. We don’t have concrete ideas for what sort of platform we would make (in particular, we’re not thinking of trying to make an improved version of Anki or Beeminder specifically). If we were to do this, it would constitute a significant shift in mission.
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Until very recently, we were thinking in terms of the wiki (once fleshed out) being our core offering. I agree that our wiki navigation has much room for improvement – we were more focused on content creation, outreach and fundraising. Now that we’re shifting to maintenance mode, improving the wiki’s navigation is higher priority. However, we expect that people will find our pages through searching for a particular topic via Google more than through the portal.
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection.
I think using the standard software was the correct choice, and IMHO it would be better to forget completely about making your own code. Even if you acquire more programming and design experience.
To explain why, just look at how much time it takes to add new features to LessWrong website, even the seemingly trivial ones like “display meetup announcements and dicsussion articles separately”. Months and months.
It’s because the web technologies are getting more and more complex over years. More and more features are invented, more and more functionality is considered “standard”, because everyone else has it. But it all still needs a lot of work and maintenance! Unless you want to become a full-time software development company, that means unless you have a group of coders that only do the web interface and nothing else, just don’t do this. Otherwise you risk spending hundreds of hours on mediocre product, where you could have better functionality by e.g. using some more advanced MediaWiki features.
If information is your product, I would suggest making the wiki page easier to navigate. For example the starting page seems like… well, honestly if someone would send me a hyperlink to that, or if google would show me that, I would just quickly close the browser tab.
For example:
Uhm, why are the words “college admissions”, “college selection” et cetera not hyperlinks? Is that some anti-SEO signalling? Which one of your customers would search for “portal”? Does anyone even use that word in this century? Instead of “a link to portal which hopefully contains the links to X, Y, Z”, just provide the links to X, Y, Z directly. Pur a simple but colored picture representing “college”, and clickable “college admissions”, “college selection” etc below it.
Okay, maybe when you started doing this, you didn’t see the wiki as your primary tool, so you gave it less attention. But maybe now it seems different. Make it easy to navigate, if that’s your main product. You made a lot of good research—great! But it also needs to be accessible, otherwise people will not read it.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and share your thoughts :).
I agree that if we are trying to do something with the same approximate functionality as MediaWiki or WordPress, it’s best to use these standard softwares, even if we think our needs are somewhat different. So I am satisfied with the interface choices we made given our content focus.
What I had in mind was more that we might want to create some sort of customized, interactive website, software, or app, such as the ones we listed (Anki, Beeminder). Here, it’s harder to use an existing, off-the-shelf solution. We’d have to code it ourselves. Now, at present, we don’t have specific ideas for such interactive websites, but there may be scope for such websites in the future. If we have more programming experience, we’ll be able to come up with and evaluate such ideas.
We will be looking into improving our main page. Thanks for the pointer there. In general, there’s a conflict between keeping the front page sufficiently simple and including enough information on it so that people can easily find what they want. We’ve been looking regularly at our site’s usage analytics to refine our decisions as to how to restructure the site, and we intend to continue doing so.
Sorry for the tone in previous message; I was tired, and wanted to deliver the information.
I’d ask it this way: What is your core mission? Seems to me it is “providing advice for students”. So I’d recommend to focus 100% on this, and treat everything else as a shiny distraction. (Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection. For example: On the main page, you have a link to “What we offer and why”. Why not put that into the main page? The page “What we offer and why” contains a link to “Learning portal”; the page “Learning portal” contains a link to “Our category on the benefits of learning particular subjects” (and also directly to math, algebra and economics; this part well-done!), and the page “Category:Subject learning benefits” contains a link to e.g. “Chemistry learning benefits”. And the “Chemistry learning benefits” contains a text “We’re still working on this page, so check back later!” (and a hyperlink to a useful topic). -- Uhm, seriously? It takes four clicks to discover the page about to chemistry, only to learn that you have almost nothing about chemistry?
On the other hand, I guess I understand how this all happened. This is a “top down” approach: you create a huge abstract structure where you want to fill the details later. This feels very high-status. But it’s optimized for how you feel about it, not for the convenience of the reader. -- I suggest the opposite, “bottom up” approach. You have the valuable pieces of information (for example the external link to quora article about learning chemistry). That’s the value you provide, and you want to navigate the reader there as easily as possible. So you build the navigation pages around the content you already have, not around the content you wish you had.
For example, one external hyperlink is not enough to make a separate page about chemistry. You probably have more such links for other subjects, so it makes sense to create a page “Advice about specific subjects”, divide it to subjects by headers and subheaders, and put the links there. (In future, when you have more than 10 chemistry-related links, or perhaps if you have 5 chemistry-related links but you also provide a short summary below the link, then it’s the right time to create a separate “Advice about Chemistry” page.) And your main page should link directly to the “Advice about specific subjects” page, because that’s one of the main things you provide. There: Just two clicks, and the reader is reading the Quora article. There is the same information there as before, it’s just easier to find.
Maybe it would be good to have one person researching the information you want to put on the web page, and another person who would maintain the structure of the web. One person to focus on “what” and other person to focus on “how”.
Hi Villiam,
Thanks again. We really appreciate the detailed comment.
I discussed your comment with Vipul, but didn’t have a chance to run the final version of my response by him.
Vipul was making the general point that to date we’ve been focused on content, partially out of virtue of lacking technical skills, and that it could be more socially valuable create a platform. We don’t have concrete ideas for what sort of platform we would make (in particular, we’re not thinking of trying to make an improved version of Anki or Beeminder specifically). If we were to do this, it would constitute a significant shift in mission.
Until very recently, we were thinking in terms of the wiki (once fleshed out) being our core offering. I agree that our wiki navigation has much room for improvement – we were more focused on content creation, outreach and fundraising. Now that we’re shifting to maintenance mode, improving the wiki’s navigation is higher priority. However, we expect that people will find our pages through searching for a particular topic via Google more than through the portal.
Until a month ago or so, we had most of our pages linked to from the front page. It was starting to seem too cluttered, so we switched to a more modular design. Now that we’ve decided not to produce a lot of pages in the near future, it may be better to switch back, or adopt some compromise.